Getting your player ready...
WASHINGTON — Obama administration officials on Tuesday defended their plan for studying how drinking water may be affected by the hydraulic-fracturing process used to extract natural gas from underground rock formations.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s congressionally mandated probe is set to conclude with a final report in 2014 and an interim one at the end of 2012, along with other unscheduled updates.
But John Deutch, an MIT professor heading an Energy Department task force studying natural-gas drilling on a much shorter time frame, said the EPA is taking too long.
EPA officials said they were examining ways to speed up the process, but they insisted that it would be impossible to more quickly wrap up such a detailed study.
